The 6 Service Offers

The 6 Service Offers – Education, Employment, Health and Wellbeing, Social Connections, Civic Participation, and Housing and Living Skills – are critical to the Model. The inclusion and development of these 6 Offers is grounded in research and practice evidence that highlights the role of these domains in facilitating young people’s successful transition to adulthood.

Education

Education is at the heart of the Offers as we know that early school leavers experience social exclusion at three times the rate of those who have completed Year 12.⁵¹ In addition, research has shown that:

People who had experienced homelessness in the last 10 years reported lower levels of educational attainment. After standardising for age, of adults who had been homeless, one third (33%) had not gone beyond Year 10 at school nor obtained a non-school qualification above Certificate II level, compared with 23% of those who had never been homeless. ⁵²

Employment

The 1989 HREOC path-breaking report on youth homelessness found that ‘unemployment was a cause of youth homelessness in two ways. First unemployment was a factor in family conflict and the decision to leave home. Second, unemployed young people could not afford adequate accommodation due to inadequate income’.⁵³

As many have noted, homeless young people have particular difficulty accessing the labour market even when there are semi-skilled jobs available. Youth employment policy and programs underestimate ‘the issues that many young homeless young people face and the effort required to overcome them’. It is clear that ‘major reform is needed to link education, training and employment program with accommodation and other supports’.⁵⁴

Health and Wellbeing

Health and Wellbeing is foregrounded as we know that this is critical to education and employment pathways. For Johanna Wyn, Director of the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne:

… education and health systems are most closely associated with young people’s wellbeing, along with families and young people themselves, neither system ‘owns’ wellbeing. Because neither system provides a basis for a systematic approach to young people’s wellbeing, young people’s wellbeing slips through. It is lost somewhere in between, an individual responsibility of young people and their families. ⁵⁵

Through the Health and Wellbeing Offer, Foyer aims to develop positive health and wellbeing practices for students and to prioritise wellbeing as an over-arching, coordinated part of the Offers.

Social Connections

Relationships with people who value and support you are known to have a positive effect on wellbeing. These relationships build self-esteem and motivation to engage with others and the broader community. The Social Connections Offer builds students’ social networks, including those that enhance their social capital and enable them to connect to the community and access employment and other opportunities.

Three dimensions of social capital are commonly distinguished – bonding, bridging and linking. Bonding social capital refers to social networks founded on trust and reciprocity with a community of people who are similar (e.g., family, friends). Bridging social networks refer to social relationships established across diverse communities (e.g., EFY Foyer students engaged with local youth sporting team). Linking social capital refers to relationships or social connections between individuals and institutions of authority (students and employer). All three are important for the construction of a civil society and individual health and wellbeing: bonding social capital builds social support and solidarity, and bridging and linking for providing resources, opportunities and links to institutions and systems that aid ‘getting ahead’.⁵⁶ EFY Foyers aim to develop all three.

Civic Participation

Positive purpose is fostered through engagement in community activities for the benefit of others. This is one of the most important factors for good health and wellbeing.⁵⁷ It provides people with a central mission or vision for life and a sense of directedness.⁵⁸ Having purpose has been linked with positive physical and psychological health outcomes including:

• greater life satisfaction⁵⁹
• higher self-esteem, optimism and positive emotion⁶⁰
• resilience, coping and grit.⁶¹

Housing and Living Skills

Stable Housing is crucial for health and wellbeing.⁶² This is evidenced by research that examines the negative health impacts that precarious housing can have on both physical and mental health. The key elements of inadequate housing that affect health are:

• inadequate housing hardware and amenity, such as poor quality housing (e.g., leaking, damp, etc.) unsafe (e.g., low security, inadequate wiring)
• inadequate space, where household’s capacity to control or contain what occurs in the living is restricted (e.g., overcrowded)
• poor location, due to unsafe or under-resourced neighborhood or location that restricts the household or person’s access to social connections
• unaffordable housing
• insecure tenure.

As such, the provision of adequate housing can then be considered a preventative heath intervention.⁶³ And developing the skills to access and sustain adequate housing, in addition to maximising the education and training opportunities that have the potential to increase earnings, will limit the ill-effects of precarious housing.